


The Orange Room

by velexiraptor



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: I don't know what I'm doing, Kinda, i just got inspired and wrote like 4000 words, i'm only like halfway through season 2 anyway, no spoilers in this, not connected to the metaplot really, season 1 skeptic jon, think of this like the transcript of an episode i guess, this is my first fic plz be gentle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23975119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velexiraptor/pseuds/velexiraptor
Summary: Case #0091206. Statement of Heather Lochner, regarding her recurring dream of an orange room. Original statement given 12th June 2009. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	The Orange Room

Statement begins.

So I have this recurring dream. There is a room about ten foot square – wait, sorry, three meters, you're English – and the whole room and everything in it is this bright, fluorescent, piercing orange. There's a desk with an ornamental vase on it, with a few flowers that look a little wilted, a wooden chair, and sometimes a few other small knick-knacks. Stuff you'd find on a desk. Nothing out of the ordinary, like pens and paper and stuff, whatever. No door, I just... end up inside the room, somehow, like that's where the dream starts. It's actually not that interesting; I just spent a while in there, maybe play around with a few things on the desk. Doodled a little bit with the pens. They were all orange too, as well as the paper, but that didn't seem to matter when I drew with them, like, I could tell what I was drawing even though it was all the same color. Dream logic, you know?

I'm no artist – still not, not really – but since I was in there for what felt like an hour every few nights, I starting using the supplies the room gave me to practice. I figured it was better than being bored in my dreams, I get enough of that at my desk job. It went pretty well at first; the skills didn't exactly transfer to real life (shocker, I know, dreams aren't real), but what did happen is that I started having the dream more often. Weekly turned into every other night, and then it turned into just, where I went when I dreamed. I got better at art in the room; not color theory for obvious reasons, but linework and still lives of those flowers or my hands. I didn't really start practicing it in the waking world. You know how you always mean to pick up a new hobby, and spend like fifty bucks on supplies, then never touch them until you do a deep-clean and throw them out? It was like that, except I was still drawing in the dreams. My doodles on post-its at work got pretty good, though, which was a neat trick.

The orange room seemed to get what I was doing, in that odd dream-logic way. The supplies on the desk got more consistent and more complex, from pencils to charcoal sets and from legal pads to mixed-media sketchbooks. Eventually a set of paints (all orange) and a bright orange canvas on an easel appeared too, and I started working in orange acrylics. I don't really know the terminology, it never gave me books, or anything to paint besides the vase and the flowers and the desk. I started pinning the orange paintings I made to the orange walls, with a set of orange thumbtacks that I found on the desk one night. The paintings stuck around, which was nice, I could track my progress and knew I was getting somewhere. My style, if you could call it that, tended towards the photorealistic. Not much else to do there besides still lives, after all.

I don't know when I realized that I didn't dream about anything else anymore. I think it was around the time the cans of spray paint showed up, and when I started thinking of the orange room as my studio.

There were four or five cans, all of the same piercing orange, but I could somehow tell that they were supposed to be a gradient. For shadows and stuff. And I was a little mystified at first, because I didn't really know what I was supposed to do with them. Not that I'd known what to do with any of this stuff, it all just sort of happened. But they were there, and I was a little bored of doing the same paintings over and over, so I pulled down a few of my older paintings from the wall, shook up a can, and *pshhht* – put up a quick blotch of orange. It felt good. Really good. Like everything I'd been doing was just a precursor to this. Like I'd found some sort of purpose, in that dream-logic sort of way.

Then I had an idea. It didn't quite make sense, but nothing really does in a dream anyway, right? If I wanted to dream about other things, other places besides the room, if I wanted to explore, I needed to exit the studio. I needed a door. So I dutifully grabbed the spray cans and a roll of masking tape (for crisp lines, you see) and went to work on the bare orange wall.

It took a week of dreams, furiously painting, for me to get it all just right. I stared at the inside of the door of my apartment for an hour before I went to bed, in order to replicate its every detail in the dream. Lighting, the handle, even the keyhole. And whenever I needed a new tool or a new shade of the same piercing orange, I'd find it in a corner of the room I just hadn't looked closely at enough before. Dream logic.

And once it was done, I took pride in my handiwork. I say I'd gotten good at realism and still lives; well, this was indistinguishable from a door that'd just been built into the room in the first place. So I reached out, grasped the handle, turned, and pushed. It swung open easily, as if I'd just oiled the hinges. It didn't even creak.

The light blinded me for a second. I hadn't seen anything that wasn't orange for a long time in my dreams, besides I suppose the backs of my hands. It seemed almost an alien white, gleaming with cyan afterimage of the orange room, but once my vision got used it it was just a regular cream wall of a corridor. Down the hall it opened into a wide, marble atrium – most of the lights were off, but there was enough to see by. It was a place I recognized, actually; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. That's where I'm from, no, don't tell me you can hear the accent, I don't have one. No one there does these days, not if they're under thirty. I was intrigued and excited; like, I'd gone once or twice as a kid and I'd always been meaning to go now that I was older and could actually appreciate art instead of chasing my little brother around the galleries. I just... never got around to it. Life got in the way.

I don't remember everything from inside the museum, and I didn't at the time think anything of it. I walked around a little, admired the art, sat down, y'know. Grabbed a pastry out of the museum cafe trays when I got dream-hungry. The novelty of it was the only interesting bit, besides how accurate it all felt. It was all proportionate, it all made sense, there was nothing changing as I turned around or sudden appearances from childhood figures or staring at paintings and sudden scene changes into whatever the painting depicted. Too mundane. Too sensical. Real logic, not dream logic.

At some point in the dream, I don't quite remember why or when, I laid down on a museum bench to take a quick rest, and awoke – real awoke, not back into the dream (I think) – to someone prodding me. A security guard. He didn't quite know what to make of me; I was too well-dressed to be a vagrant, obviously not an employee... I was pretty stunned that I wasn't in my bed, obviously, so I just let him lead me out of the building and warn me for trespassing. I was lucky, if entirely mystified. I still haven't paid the fine.

I assumed that I'd just sleepwalked. How I sleepwalked all the way from my apartment, down 20 floors in an elevator, into a locked building with 24 hour security, I rationalized away by not thinking about it at all. I'd never had trouble with sleepwalking before; apart from the recurring dream of my studio I'd never had any sort of sleep abnormalities before. I resolved to talk about it with my doctor at my next check-up, whenever that was, or maybe call if it happened again. My insurance isn't great and phone calls are scary, okay?

I got more careful the next time I opened the door in my dreams. It still opened into the MFA, I just... made sure I remembered where the door was when I left my studio. I started looking through the galleries for inspiration, trying to replicate ones that struck a chord with me from memory after returning through the piercing orange door. This turned into my new night-time dream routine. Step out, get inspired, return, try to make a bright orange replica on bright orange canvas with bright orange paint. When I got fed up with trying to go from memory, I took pens and paper with me out of the room into the museum to make some notes and sketches. It worked pretty well, all told, though it's not like I could show anyone my work – it was all, after all, a dream.

About a month into this, I made a mistake. I'd combed one of the upper galleries and found an out-of-the-way hallway blocked off by one of those black stretchy line guard things. It was part of the dream, so I paid it no heed, ducking under it to explore what laid beyond. It turned out to be a staging area for a traveling exhibition that'd be displayed the next week. Works of a painter named Esmerelda Findley, some mid-20th century surrealist with a life full of tragedy and loss. Intrigued, I snuck a peek at one of the paintings, and then another, and another. Each had that same piercing quality I found in my studio and my own work, in other colors of the spectrum – lime green, cyan, something just shy of purple, and a color I've never seen before or since that I can only describe as "infra-black". I don't know how she made them, or how they were so clearly full, rich scenes when every stroke of paint in each image was the same shade as all the rest, but I was struck by how incredibly similar to the orange room and my own orange work they all were. So I dutifully (if hurriedly) took down quick notes on the brushwork and the scenes depicted and scurried with all due haste back to my studio.

I was so excited to paint these new finds, struck by a bolt of inspiration. Of familiarity. I could add to the gallery; my work meant something, was valuable, was a connection to someone else – this Findley woman – who must have had dreams like mine. So I'd shut the door behind me once again was wreathed in the piercing orange of my studio. I'd settled my sketch on the desk, beside the easel and canvas, and was mixing orange into orange to make, um, orange. It sounds weird when I describe it, but, I don't know, it made sense in the dream. It was the right color for what I was painting, is what mattered. That's when I heard a knock. Something from outside.

I was startled enough to drop my palette as I leapt from the chair. I held my brush like a weapon, like a sword. I don't know what good it could have done. I don't really know what I was expecting in the first place. Dreams don't make sense, it could have been anything – a swarm of spiders like a tidal wave, a not-quite-a-man with too many bones in his hands, the nothingness of space sucking me and everything in the room out into the infinite void. I held my breath as if to scream, but it was a dream, of course no one could come to my aid. I don't know why I didn't think to just wake up.

And at the end of it all, when the door swung outwards, it was just a man. The lanyard around his neck marked him clearly as just another beleaguered museum employee. Brown hair, about five-ten? He looked sad and tired, with a patchy beard like he hadn't shaved in a week. In his hand was one of my bright orange charcoals, one of a half dozen in different weights I brought with me to do my sketches. I must have dropped it in my haste to return to the room, my hunger to replicate Findley’s beautifully familiar style.

He seemed startled to see me – as anyone would be, I suppose, after finding a room that's out of someone else's dreams, and shakily asked me if I was allowed to be in here after hours. I was just about to respond, exactly as startled, when the room's door swung abruptly closed with a weighty bang. I shot straight up out of bed and heard one last sound – like the clicking of a lock – before shaking my head to clear the fog of sleep from my mind. It was around 2:30 in the morning, but I couldn't get back to sleep, so I shrugged and thought nothing of it. It was a sleepy day at work, and I needed a few more coffees to get through the day, but nothing else odd occurred. I just assumed I'd had a bad dream for the first time in a long time.

The next night I dreamed of the room again, and I was put out when I saw that everything I'd worked on over the past few months was gone. The canvas, the acrylics, the pens and charcoals, the spray paint cans, the sketchbooks, all the paintings I'd pinned up all over the walls. Even the thumbtack holes! Just the desk, and the chair, and the vase with the flowers, just like the first time I'd dreamed it, all in piercing orange.

It's just that – when I turned around, I saw that the door was still there too. Closed, but I moved to turn the handle, and it twisted easily. Not locked.

I didn't open the door that night. I just sat in the room and thought. Sketched out a few things in orange water from the orange vase when I got really bored, but after about an hour as usual I woke up again.

This continued for about a week. Every time I'd try to open the door in my dream, the handle would twist, and once I even pushed it open a crack, but I never opened it enough to see anything beyond the orange room before closing it again. I don't know why I didn't open it all the way, then. But I do now.

I've been chronically single for a long time. First I thought it was because boys just weren't interested in me, then a little bit later I realized that none of those dates went well because I just wasn't interested in boys. It's Massachusetts, we've had common-law for a while now, all of my friends were pretty accepting when I came out. One of them – Allie, though I think all of them were in on it – took it upon herself to set me up with pretty much any lesbian she met. I humored her, and got some pretty nice dates out of it all, though no one who I clicked with. But the last girl Allie set me up with, well, it wasn't her fault, but what happened on that date shook me a little, and it's why I'm talking to you now.

We'd gone to get coffee and had a nice enough time. She ordered a mocha, I got an americano, we talked about our jobs and the crash and our hobbies (I mentioned art, if only as a passing phase) and her cats. We'd just paid, and were walking out, when a poster on a telephone pole outside caught my eye.

It was a missing persons poster, printed in fluorescent orange. You know, "Have You Seen This Man" kind of deal, a number to call, whatever. The kind of thing you see every few weeks minimum in any big city in the world. I wouldn't have paid it any mind, except for the fact that everything on the posters was the same bright, piercing shade of orange too – the picture, the text, even the staple affixing it to the telephone pole. By any rights it shouldn't have been legible at all, this wasn't like bad internet graphic design where it's dark grey on black, it was all literally the same shade of orange. Just like my studio.

I never really questioned it in my dreams, I mean, that's just weird dream things, they happen all the time, my dreams of the orange room had more of a thru-line than most I've read about or had. It just shouldn't have worked in the real world, and yet I could read the flyer plain as day, number and all. I asked my date if she could see it too, and I think she thought I was just making an ill-advised crack at a graphic designer's expense. She could read it alright, though she said was a little difficult to make out some of the finer details, and when I mentioned to her that it was all the same shade she just shrugged it off. Close enough, she said, but no one's ever going to find that man if they keep putting up posters that are such an eyesore. She laughed, and made to walk away, but my curiosity – and my confusion – kept me there just a little longer. Then I froze up like a deer in headlights.

I suddenly realized where I'd seen the man on the poster. He was the sad-faced MFA employee who'd walked into my studio, the orange room, in my dream. Who’d found my charcoal. Right before the door had swung closed, and I’d woken up. The date he disappeared was the same night that I'd had my dream. If that means anything, I suppose I'm the last one to have seen him alive.

The date ended soon after and I didn’t call her back. I was a little preoccupied with potentially being the prime suspect in a disappearance case. Of course that’s ridiculous, it’s not like the police have a supernatural investigations department, or anything tying my dreams to his disappearance, and I didn’t even really have a good reason to believe that this was anything besides one weird coincidental dream. A bad case of deja vu, maybe. I still sort of hope that’s all it was.

But I still dream of the orange room. I’ve started hearing voices in it. Yelling. Pounding on the walls and the door and the ceiling. Sometimes I think I can hear the voices while I’m lying in bed, too. I try to drift off, but faint screams yank me back to the waking world. My doctor ended up just prescribing me melatonin and telling me to talk to a shrink. I haven’t scheduled that yet. I should, when I get back to the states. When I can sleep, when I do dream, I block the door with the desk and the chair and anything else that shows up in the room. I dump the flowers out of the vase and hold it close, like a weapon. Because I think the room... ate him.

I don't know why it won't eat me. I don't want to feed it anyone else, but I don't know how to stop dreaming. I've asked professionals, but they're all very up front about the fact that they don't even really know why people dream in the first place, besides the fact that it's important. I never tell them this, it's not like anyone besides your institute would believe me anyway. Thanks, I suppose.

Statement ends.

Ms. Lochner took a work trip to London about a month after the incident she described, during which she gave her statement to Gertrude Robinson (the Institute’s previous head archivist). I asked Martin to follow-up on the particulars, and while there’s little we can do with regards to events on the other side of the Atlantic, he did manage to get ahold of records of disappearances in the Boston area from the relevant time period and there was one Carter Rahn, employed by the Museum of Fine Arts, whose description matches Ms. Lochner’s statement.

Of course, this means very little on its own – people do just go missing in mundane ways all the time, and there’s no corresponding record of the posters that she described. It’s a pity she didn’t think to take it with her, or bring it over here; having that sort of physical confirmation goes a long way towards proving the authenticity of what is so often easily the product of an overactive imagination.

The exhibition of Esmeralda Findley’s work is a different matter altogether. She’s a relatively obscure artist from her era, and her work is rather middling (at least, in Martin’s not-particularly-professional opinion as an art critic). If there’s a traveling exhibition with paintings like those Ms. Lochner described, it does not seem to be documented in any of the online archives of her work. Knowing the difficulty of recording some of these statements in digital media, it’s perhaps a point in her favor, but it’s sadly unfalsifiable. Equally likely is the possibility that she simply imagined these paintings, but Martin does seem to be entranced by the idea that there are some lost Findleys out there in a private collection in America. Always the romantic, I suppose.

We can’t get in touch with Ms. Lochner for a follow-up statement. It doesn’t seem like there’s any reason we wouldn’t be able to, seeing as she’s fairly active on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She did end up pursuing art after all, and her work is reminiscent of Findley’s in composition and materials. Notably, all her works shy away from using the color orange, though that could be merely a phobia brought on by distressing yet _perfectly mundane_ experiences. Ultimately, there’s no indication that she’s seen any of our requests to communicate, and I see no reason to continue devoting the limited resources of the Institute to investigating a case both overseas and seven years onwards.

End recording.


End file.
